“Few computer families could trace their vintage to the 1980s, let alone the 1960s,” former IBM VP Irving Wladawsky-Berger wrote in the WSJ’s CIO Journal last week. “It’s a remarkable tale of longevity in one of the most competitive industries in the world.”

But while the mainframe is still around, the market for high-end computing has changed dramatically with the rise of a new generation of low-cost server farms and cloud computing services. Whether you’re an Internet giant or an upstart photo-sharing app, a big machine from IBM is now far from the only way to get the heavy computing work done, and certainly not the cheapest.

Sales plunged in 2013 — mainframes fell 37% and high-end Power servers fell 31% — and the revenue drops were bad enough that CEO Ginni Rometty and her senior executive team chose to forgo their annual bonuses.

This week, IBM is making another big roll of the dice on the future of its computer systems. More on this after the jump… Read More »

Many elements of Apple’s new smartphones may be matched quickly. But the new chip inside its iPhone 5S is pretty far out there.

Apple’s A7 processor is the first for mobile devices that can crunch 64 bits of data at a time, compared to 32 bits for most other chips used in smartphones. The advance certainly underscores the company’s ability to push semiconductor technology, though Apple’s motivations are not exactly obvious. Read More »